June 18th 2011 Advertising (12)
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 6/17/2011
Circa 1870. Sometime in the 1850s Cuban cigarette manufacturer Louis Susini began bundling his smokes in colorful 4 - 3/4” x 3 - 3/8” paper wrappers, one of the earlier uses of full color lithographic labels to package a product. No one knows who came up with the brilliant idea to design the labels in sets, thus becoming the first use of a collectible to sell tobacco, but it was a stroke of marketing genius because Cuban cigarettes were the most expensive in the world, generally selling for three to ten times as much as local brands. Criminals in Europe, Asia and South America attempted to cash in by packaging cheap local cigarettes in fake Honradez labels. When Honradez began using the latest in printing technology to wrap cigarettes in colorful themed sets, like butterflies, fables and military uniforms rather than one standard black and white label, it made their package much more difficult to counterfeit. The clever pioneering artists at Honradez helped foil fakers by not only changing the theme and the number of pictures in a set, but by changing the borders surrounding the central image. Whether intentional or not, the lack of standard borders and the continually changing company logo depicting the statue of Justice that stood in front of the factory added to the faker’s dilemma. The lithographic stones for these labels were idiosyncratically hand drawn, though each series appears to have been created by a single artist.
Condition: (Very Good).
Item Dimensions: 39" x 47".